The Drying

Any sunken town’s a fairy palace,
Simply as human ruins signify
Mystery to the signifying mind.

There’s plenty of things to learn from the drowned,
Plenty of information to be found,
But one thing you may not have thought about,

Even if you’re an archaeologist,
Is that, if the spooky drowned town is grist
For dreaming, why can’t mere stones do this trick?

That is, although meaning is brought to store
And taken away as discovered, more
Meaning can collect around certain forms.

Anything vaguely anthropomorphic,
Anything suggesting human gossip,
Anything redolent of injustice.

It’s not surprising then that so often,
When science hauls up fresh information,
People only express disappointment

And complain of the death of enchantment,
Of arrogance spoiling the mystery,
The rich sense of meaning, the poetry.

Every time someone finds the nonhuman
Not human, it feels somehow inhuman,
As if a drowned town’s just stones once in sun.

It seems an even sterner conclusion,
If this means meaning’s so purely human
That its truth has nothing to do with it.